Friday, July 12, 2013

Updates

Life continues to plod along with us. The children are adapting to their new family. Katerina started off not wanting anything to do with Andrew, but she has recently been helping with his bottle and kissing him and trying to pick him up and so forth. Katerina is very funny and has a great sense of humor.

Andrew is not screaming as much as he did at first. When you've lived your whole life in a box, everything is new and potentially terrifying. He is also cutting multiple teeth, which does not help. It doesn't help that he was a favorite and used to getting his way.

We have had our first embassy appointment. The children passed the TB test.

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We went to the zoo in Kiev.

We went with another family who was adopting. They were leaving for their region and a first meeting with their daughter that day.

The most pressing issue is passports for the children to immigrate to the US. Ukraine changed passport companies. For three weeks, no-one has gotten passports (in Ukraine, they use passports as a primary form of ID). There are 120,000 people backlogged in the system along with us. They finally printed some passports early in the week, only to have the equipment be faulty and 80% were misprinted. They are still negotiating contracts for delivery of the passports once they figure out how to print them.

What this means is that we have all the documents listing us as the parents of the children. We have the children in our care. And yet - we can't actually leave. Or rather, we can leave but our children can't. We had expected the trip to last about five weeks. We have been here for eight weeks. There has been one government delay after another. This is just icing on the cake. There are many adoptive families who are stuck here like we are.